A diverse and inclusive scientific community is more productive, innovative, and impactful, yet ecology and evolutionary biology continues to be dominated by white, male faculty. Through a nationwide survey of ecology and evolutionary biology faculty, we quantified faculty engagement in activities related to diversity and inclusion and identified factors that facilitate or hinder participation. We used a tailored design method to develop the survey, conducted two rounds of pre-testing, and administered the final online survey from March 21 to April 24, 2018. We used generalized linear mixed effects models with a negative binomial distribution to evaluate relationships between the frequency of times that faculty engaged in various diversity and inclusion activities and several a priori predictors of interest: race/ethnicity; first-generation status; gender; sexual orientation; whether faculty were born outside the United States; public or private institution; or academic rank.
Results/Conclusions
We show that faculty with underrepresented identities (i.e. nonwhite, non-male and first-generation) disproportionally engaged in diversity and inclusion activities, including outreach to diverse K-12 schools, recruitment of minority faculty and undergraduate students, authoring diversity-focused peer-reviewed publications, organizing and attending diversity workshops, and serving on diversity committees. Of the 91.7% of faculty respondents that actively engaged, more than half strongly agreed that they were motivated by the desire to train diverse leaders as role models, increase scientific literacy among diverse groups, improve research and teaching in their fields, and because they felt morally obligated. The majority of faculty (71.7%) also felt that engaging in these activities was relatively unimportant for tenure decisions. Faculty perceived time and funding as major limitations to engagement in activities to advance diversity and inclusion. We suggest that institutions invest resources to catalyze faculty engagement (e.g., recruitment and mentoring of diverse students, inclusive pedagogy, and community outreach), and place greater value on these activities in ways that are measurable, do not simply add to current expectations, and promote shared responsibility for a more diverse and inclusive discipline.